‘Climate diplomacy a strategic issue for Pakistan’

Islamabad : Dr. Adil Najam, Inaugural Dean, Boston University, has said that Pakistan needs to take climate diplomacy differently, as a strategic issue, more than any other issue.

Dr. Najam was addressing as a guest speaker at a Public Talk on “Climate Diplomacy” organised here by the Institute of Strategic Studies (ISS).

Dr. Najam said that there is no dearth of seriousness to this issue. He touched upon multiple issues and concerns regarding climate change and climate diplomacy. He was of the view that the world largely failed to produce any agreement regardless of the multiple global conferences that took place in the past.

Climate is no longer a future issue and has become an everyday concern with constant human adaptation and Pakistan is no exception, he emphasised. It is an issue that has mostly affected the developing countries including Pakistan as approximately a third of Pakistan's population is facing challenges regarding climate adaptation primarily in the agricultural sector mostly because of water.

He was of the view that countries like Pakistan which are more climatic, agricultural, and water-dependent, will have to bear the maximum cost of climate change, hence, Pakistan has to change its efforts both nationally and internationally to address the issue diplomatically and make it a serious diplomatic cause. Dr. Najam went on to say that Pakistan as the head of G-77 got an opportunity to lead the cause as G-77 has clout on multiple international forums if not all. He shed light on the failure of climate diplomacy and raised five main issues including failure to act on knowledge, failure of negotiations, failure of diplomacy, vulnerability failure, and failure of politics.

Concluding his talk, Dr Najam touched upon the failure of multilateralism, which became the biggest casualty of the Corona pandemic, an element that is also missing in addressing the issue of climate change.

Earlier, in his welcome remarks, Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhry, Director General ISS, said that climate change is a serious threat, more than what the world recognises, and more is needed to be done to address this particular menace.